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IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MARCH 23, 1872. 


The House having met for debate as in Committee 
of the Whole on the State of the Union— 

Mr. McCRARY said: 

Mr. Speaker : I am one of the number 
who believe that a thorough, radical, and 
permanent reform in the civil service is 
demanded by the best interests, not only 
of the Government itself, but of its public 
servants and the people generally. I have 
long been convinced that the evils of the sys¬ 
tem, which for nearly forty years has been 
practiced by whatever party has happened to 
be in power, are so great as to call loudly for 
a remedy. So believing, I voted cheerfully for 
that provision of the act of March 3, 1871, 
which provides— 

“That the President of the United States be, and 
he is hereby, authorized to prescribe such rules and 
regulations for the admission of persons into the civil 
service of the United States as will best promote the 
efficiency thereof, and ascertain the fitness of each 
candidate in respect to age, health, character, knowl¬ 
edge, and ability for the branch of service into which 
he seeks to enter; and for this purpose the President 
is authorized to employ suitable persons to conduct 
said inquiries, to prescribe their duties, and to es¬ 
tablish regulations for the conduct of persons who 
may receive appointments in the civil service.” 

Although this provision, as I thought at the 
time of its adoption, promised nothing more 
than a partial and temporary remedy, and 
therefore stopped far short of the reform 
really needed, it seemed to me a step in the 
right direction. I expected little from it, 
because it was not aimed at the chief evil of 
the civil service. It limited the power of,the 
commissioners to be appointed under it to 
prescribing “rules and regulations for the 
admission of persons into the civil service,” 
whereas the great evil of removals without 
cause was left untouched. It may be well 
enough to guard the entrance into the civil 
service by proper regulations, but this is of 
small moment when compared to the import¬ 
ance of securing to every official some certain 





permanence of tenure and security against 
causeless and sudden removal. 

The act in question also provided for estab¬ 
lishing rules for ascertaining “the fitness of 
each candidate in respect to age, health, char¬ 
acter, knowledge, and ability for the branch 
of service into which he seeks to enter;” but 
want of fitness in these respects was, and is, 
among the least of the evils of the service. I 
supported this measure, therefore, only because 
I felt that something was demanded, and be¬ 
cause at the time nothing beyond this was 
within our reach ; but I was well convinced then 
and am still more thoroughly convinced now, 
that other and more radical and far-reaching 
measures must be resorted to. 

THE TRUE REMEDY. 

The measures which seem to me essential 
are the following: 

1. A fixed and definite term of office for 
every civil officer of the Government, (with a 
few necessary exceptions,) and removals for 
cause only. 

2. The election of Federal officers by the 
people in all cases where this is practicable. 

The first could be accomplished, temporarily 
at least, by an act of Congress, since the na¬ 
tional Legislature may under the Constitution 
fix the tenure of all civil officers ; and I am in 
favor of the passage of such a bill at the pres¬ 
ent session. 

The second can only be accomplished by 
an amendment to the Constitution. In my 
judgment any reform in the civil service 
which is to permanently remedy the evils 
of which we complain must be by way of con¬ 
stitutional amendment. I have accordingly 
thought proper to embrace both of these prop¬ 
ositions in the following proposed constitu¬ 
tional amendment: 

Joint resolution proposing an amendment to the 
Constitution. 

Resolved lay the Senate and House of Representatives 

c ^ - 'S’ 












4 


patriotic and honest Executive such vast pat¬ 
ronage is dangerous, because he must, in a 
large majority of cases, act upon the advice 
of others, and may therefore innocently fur¬ 
ther the purposes of corrupt and designing 
men, but when this vast power comes into the 
hands of a weak or wicked man, as it has in 
the past, and may again in the future, who 
can estimate the power for evil it would give 
him? 

OBJECTIONS TO THE PLAN PROPOSED BY THE CIVIL 
SERVICE COMMISSION. 

It does not seem to me to require further 
argument to show that at the bottom of all 
the evils of the civil service lies the power 
of removal without cause and the consequent 
uncertainty of tenure. These produce nat 
urally and inevitably the great majority of 
all the evils of which we complain. If this 
be so, the utter failure of the plan adopted by 
the President upon the recommendation of 
the board of civil service commissioners is 
inevitable. It will fail because it does not 
deal with the power of removals. It will fail 
for other reasons, to which I will now call the 
attention of the House. 

It is necessarily temporary. Our present 
Chief Executive may faithfully observe it, 
but will his successor do so? He has told 
us in his message that the rules would not 
bind his successor unless they shall be em¬ 
bodied in an act of Congress. We shall see 
presently that any such act of Congress with¬ 
out an amendment of the Constitution would 
be of very questionable validity. If adopted, 
however, what guarantee of permanency have 
we? Would it not be repealed by the first 
Congress elected after its practical operation 
became known? Or if it escaped this, what 
would be its fate if some other party than that 
now in power should get control ? No sooner 
would the leaders of such a party come into 
power, than they would be set upon with 
the cry that they ought to reward those who 
were most active in securing their elevation, 
and so great would be the pressure that it 
would be next to impossible to prevent a 
repeal of all these ruies and a return to the 
old system of rewarding the victors with the 
spoils. 

I am not satisfied with these rules for another 
reason. I do not believe they are binding, or 
can be made binding upon any President, 
while the Constitution remains unchanged. 
The appointing power is vested by the Consti¬ 
tution in the President and Senate, or in the 
heads of Departments, or Courts of law. If 
Congress shall adopt the rules in question in 
the form of a statute, the effect of such statute, 
if it have any effect at all, will be to require 
the appointment in each case of one of three 
persons, to be named by a board of examiners, 
as the persons best qualified among the num¬ 
ber, be it great or small, who have seen fit to 


submit to a competitive examination. Does 
not such a provision virtually take the appoint¬ 
ing power away from the officers in whom the 
Constitution vests it? 

If Congress can compel the President to 
appoint one of three persons in a case where 
the Constitution declares the President snail 
appoint, it can of course require the appoint¬ 
ment of oqe of two, and may provide that the 
three or the two, as the case may be, from 
whom the selection must be made, shall be 
named by some person or persons other than 
the President. I know it is said that Con¬ 
gress may provide the qualifications which a 
civil officer shall possess, as that he shall be a 
citizen of the United States twenty-one years 
of age, or that he shall possess certain quali¬ 
fications of an educational character. This 
may be admitted, and the admission does not 
solve the difficulty. Suppose it be conceded 
that Congress may require all these qualifica¬ 
tions, can it provide that the President or other 
appointing officer under the Constitution shall 
be required to take, and be bound by, the 
opinion of a board of examiners, as to what 
persons are qualified? 

To state the point in another form : suppose 
the President, in violation of such a statute, 
should appoint a person possessing all the 
qualifications required, but who had not been 
examined by the board, would not such an 
appointment be perfectly legal? Under the 
Constitution I insist that the President (or the 
head of a Department, or judge of a court, as 
the case may be) can appoint any citizen pos¬ 
sessing the qualifications required by law, and 
the appointing officer is to judge of, and decide 
upon the fitness of each applicant, and can¬ 
not be compelled to take the oprrfietn^ of an 
examining board, and to shut his eyV^tJd all 
other light. Any person who is in fact quali¬ 
fied may be appointed, and the appointing 
officer may ascertain the facts in regard to 
qualifications by such means as seem to him 
best. He cannot be required to assume that 
only three men in the country are qualified 
because only that number have been examined 
and certified to him as qualified. If, therefore, 
these rules were enacted into the form of a 
statute, they would not bind an Executive who 
did not choose to be bound by them. 

Another and very serious objection to this 
system is, that it takes the responsibility for 
appointments from the President and heads 
of Departments, and places it practically no¬ 
where. If an official proved unfaithful under 
the old system, full as it was of faults, the 
Administration was held, in a measure at least, 
responsible; but under the new system, the 
appointing officer can say of such an official, 
“ He stood at the head of the list as presented 
by the examining board, and his appointment 
had to be made.” The examining board will 
shield themselves by the plea that his exam- 










5 


ination was eminently satisfactory. Let the 
number of offices to be filled by appointment 
becurtailed as faras possible, but let the power 
to make appointments be placed in the hands 
of the Executive unreservedly, and let him 
stand before the country as responsible for 
them. Do not make him the mere instrument 
of executing the wiil of others, but in so far 
as he appoints at all, let him be the real appoint* 
ing power. 

But again, is there not a serious objection to 
declaring by law that no man shall have an 
office unless he seeks it and travels perhaps 
to Washington to appear before a board, and, 
in the confessed character of an-office-seeker, 
to submit to the humiliation of a public com¬ 
petitive examination, and take all the many 
chances of success? Is there not something in 
the idea that the office should seek the man, 
and not the man the office? Will not such a 
regulation disgust the best men in the country 
and deter them from applying for positions in 
the civil service? I think it will. 

In this connection let me add that it is in¬ 
tegrity, incorruptible honesty, that is needed 
in public officials. These are qualities not to 
be discovered by a competitive examination. 
It is of vastly more importance that a post¬ 
master, reveuue collector, or the head of a 
bureau should be a man of high character for 
rectitude in business, for private morality and 
devoted patriotism, than that he should excel 
all others in penmanship or in his proficiency 
in any or all the branches of a first-class educa¬ 
tion. 

Another, and I think an insuperable objec¬ 
tion to this system is the difficulty of carryingit 
into effect. Will a board of examiners travel 
the country over so as to examine applicants 
at their places of residence? I apprehend 
such a roving commission will hardly be 
thought expedient or proper. It would cer¬ 
tainly, if attempted, fail altogether to furnish 
equal opportunities to all the people. Will 
boards be organized in each locality ? If so, 
who is to examine the examiners, and decide 
that they are fit, competent, impartial, and 
proper persons for the exercise of their almost 
autocratic powers? Under this plan their 
numbers would be legion, and as they would 
control all local appointments, how important 
that they be the right men in the right place. 

Suppose the office of postmaster in Cali¬ 
fornia shall become vacant, the salary being 
more than two hundred dollars, will the Post¬ 
master General send a commission to Califor¬ 
nia to examine applicants for the place, or 
will he require all applicants to come to 
Washington for examination? The former 
would certainly not pay ; the latter would be 
the most outrageous injustice. Will he then 
appoint a board of examiners for California 
composed of residents of that State? If so, 

I ask again, might he not with equal safety, | 


and much less trouble and expense, appoint 
the postmaster at once? It is said the special 
agents of the Post Office Department will make 
these examinations, but these special agents 
have not been appointed with any reference 
to any such duties, and are, many of them, 
entirely unfit for them. 

Besides, the rules require an examination 
by a board, and not by a single individual. 
To send a special agent over the country with 
power to decide who may and who may not be 
appointed to the office of postmaster is hardly 
in keeping with the spirit of our republican 
institutions. The old system of consulting the 
member of Congress representing the district 
in which the officer is located, may have been 
bad, but surely this would be worse. 

For these reasons, and others which I might 
name, I have no faith in competitive examin¬ 
ations as a cure for the evils of the civil ser¬ 
vice. To recapitulate briefly, I insist that this 
remedy will fail— 

1. Because it does not provide against re¬ 
movals without cause, and hence does not 
secure permanency of tenure. 

2. Because it assumes that the evil grows 
out of incompetency among officers, which is 
not the case, and that competitive examin¬ 
ations would secure greater competency and 
efficiency, which is not so. 

3. Because it favors unjustly the highly 
educated, and discriminates unjustly against 
those less favored, but not less competent. 

4. Because it cannot be made permanent. 

5. Because it cannot be made legally bind¬ 
ing upon the appointing power. 

6. It invites office-seeking, and excludes 
those who will not personally seek for official 
position. 

7. Because the all-important question, “Is 
he honest?” cannot be settled by it. 

8. Because it cannot be practically applied 
to many of the offices of the country. 

9. Because it takes away the responsibility 
of the appointing power. 

I do not complain of the President for adopt¬ 
ing the report of the civil service commission. 

I believe he did right. That board was com¬ 
posed of able and eminent men, and it was 
due to them and to the country that their plan 
should have a fair trial. Nor can the com¬ 
missioners be blamed. They were limited by 
the act Congress to “ prescribing rules and 
regulations for the admission of persons into 
the civil service,” &c. The questions of 
removals and of official tenure were not 
within the scope of their powers. In my 
opinion the result of their labors is the best 
possible illustration of the fact that our legis¬ 
lation did not touch the vital evils, and there¬ 
fore did not open the way for thorough re¬ 
form. I hear complaints made against the 
President and against the civil service com¬ 
mission because these rules are not satisfac- 














6 


tory. It may be questioned whether the rules 
are the best that could have been framed under 
the act; but certain it is that the act itself is 
very far from what it ought to have been, and 
therefore Congress should accept its full share 
of the blame, if blame there be. For myself, 
however, l am disposed neither to censure nor 
blame the President, the civil service commis¬ 
sion, or Congress, but rather to rejoice at what 
has been done by each. Not that the best 
thing or the right thing has been done, but 
because by what has been done this great 
question has been brought prominently before 
Congress and the country, and has been so 
much agitated that it must and will have a 
solution. 

ELECTION OP FEDERAL OFFICERS BY THE PEOPLE. 

When the Constitution was adopted, the 
question how postmasters should be chosen 
was doubtless considered as of little conse¬ 
quence. The office is not mentioned by name 
in the Constitution. The framers of that in¬ 
strument, wise and far-seeing men as they 
were, could have had little conception of the 
wonderful growth of the postal system of the 
United States which seventy five years has 
developed. And the system is yet in its infancy. 
In fifty years from to-day we shall doubtless 
have one hundred thousand post offices in the 
United States. 

At the time of the adoption of the Consti¬ 
tution there were only seventy five post offices 
in the Union ; on the second day of the pres¬ 
ent month there were thirty-nine thousand 
nine hundred and fifty. The increase during 
the last nine months has been nine hundred 
offices. The number of post offices was— 

In 1800. 903 

In 1805. 1,558 

In 1810. 2,300 

In 1815 . 3,000 ; 

In 1820. 4,500 ! 

In 1825 . 5,677 

In 1830. 8,450 

In 1835.10,147 

And from 1835 to the present the increase has 
averaged over eight hundred per annum. 

Why should the forty thousand postmasters 
which we now have, and the one hundred thou¬ 
sand which we shall have in half a century 
more, be appointed by an officer at the seat of 
Government, who can in the nature of things 
know nothing personally about the person ap¬ 
pointed? Is there any good reason for con¬ 
tinuing this system? 

The theory of this Government is that all 
power is derived from the people. I believe 
in this theory, and would reduce it to practice 
as far as possible. Public offices must some¬ 
times, it is true, be filled by appointment, but 
they are supposed to be thus filled by the 
agents and servants of the people, and there¬ 
fore indirectly by the people themselves. To 
make good our theory we should allow offices 
to be filled by appointment, only in cases 


where there is something in the character of 
the office, or of its duties, to make appoint¬ 
ment the better mode. In every case where 
it is practicable local officers should be chosen 
directly by the people whose servants they are 
to be, excepting a few, such as judges of the 
courts and clerks in certain Government offices. 
If the amendment to the Constitution which I 
have proposed shali be adopted, the details 
will be of course for Congress to arrange by 
determining what local officers shall be elected, 
and providing the mode and manner of hold¬ 
ing the elections. 

There is no officer of the Government, State 
or national, who sustains toward the people for 
whom and with whom he transacts public busi¬ 
ness such intimate, important, and delicate 
relations as the postmaster sustains to the com¬ 
munity whose correspondence passes through 
his hands. It would seem that if there is any 
officer in the Government who ought to be 
chosen directly by the people he is to serve, it 
is the postmaster. He is, perhaps, the only 
public officer with whom all the people have 
to deal, arid he is certainly the only one with 
whom most of the people in his neighborhood 
are compelled to have almost daily inter¬ 
course. I suppose for such an office the aim 
should be to get a man who would best satisfy 
the majority of the people. How can the 
President or the Postmaster General know 
who is that man? It is impossible that they 
should know one in ten thousand of their ap¬ 
pointees. They must appoint a person who is 
recommended by some one who is supposed to 
know more than they about the wishes of 
the people. No one can know so well as the 
people of the locality themselves who is their 
choice. Why not let them make the choice 
at once? There is always an effort to ascer¬ 
tain the wishes of the community before a 
postmaster is appointed. Petitions are often 
resorted to, the local representative is gener¬ 
ally consulted, and all for what? To ascertain, 
not precisely who is the fittest and most ac¬ 
ceptable person, but to ascertain who among 
the members of the dominant party is most 
acceptable to the people. 

All this amounts to a concession that the 
people are to be consulted—that they are 
most deeply concerned. It is impossible that 
the President should be able, in many cases, 
to determine for the people who they want. 
Necessity only can justify the appointing 
power in cases of this kind ; and there is no 
necessity. These are purely local offices. 
The district which shall elect the postmaster 
at a given place can be;easily fixed and estab¬ 
lished by law, or by an order of the Depart¬ 
ment. All the details can be readily ar¬ 
ranged by legislation. Faithfulness and 
promptness can be doubly assured by bond 
and security, and by the power of removal for 
cause. It is idle to say that the power of 


















7 


removal without cause is necessary to the 
efficiency of the service. 

THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM BEST FOR PRESIDENT AS WELL 
AS PEOPLE. 

The plan of electing local Federal officers is 
not only best for the people, and due to them, 
but it is best for the Executive. I am sure 
no true man can hold the office of President 
without devoutly praying for relief from the 
annoyance, the anxiety, and the responsibility 
of such vast patronage. The control of these 
tens of thousands of appointments, scattered 
from ocean to ocean, to be filled in nearly every 
case upon the recommendation of others, 
without knowledge or the means of knowl¬ 
edge as to the fitness of applicants, with con¬ 
flicting and contradictory recommendations 
from equally reliable sources in most cases, 
with the certainty of making a dozen enemies 
to one friend in deciding every important 
case of conflicting claims for an office—what 
greater blessing could be conferred upon the 
President than to relieve him of this great 
burden and great annoyance ? What time 
or opportunity can he have for proper atten¬ 
tion to the weightier affairs belonging to 
his great office, if he is daily and almost 
hourly occupied with these matters? Let it 
be remembered that the vast majority of the 
officers now appointed by the President or 
heads of Departments are postmasters and 
other local officers, whose election by the peo¬ 
ple could readily be provided for if the pro¬ 


posed amendment to the Constitution shall 
be adopted, and that by this means the Exec¬ 
utive will be benefited as much as the people 
themselves. 

The proposition to fill this vast number of 
local offices by a vote of the peqple rather 
than by Executive appointment must, i am 
sure, commend itself to every member of this 
House who will seriously consider it. It is 
simple justice to the people, who can always 
select for themselves from among their neigh¬ 
bors more acceptable officers than any one 
man living thousands of miles away from 
them, however pure and disinterested he may 
be, can select for them. It will allow those 
most interested to choose. It will remove 
from our politics a vast source of corruption 
by taking these offices from the hands of poli¬ 
ticians, who too often use them as so much 
political capital in securing or keeping polit¬ 
ical power, and placing them in the hands of 
the people where they rightfully belong. 
It will relieve the national Executive from 
duties and burdens already too multitudinous 
and harassing, and destined soon to become 
too great to be discharged by any one man. 
t It is entirely practicable ; it is eminently just; 
it is greatly needed and highly important now; 
it will soon become imperatively necessary. 
To say that it is unsafe or unwise is to ques¬ 
tion the virtue of the people and their ability 
to govern themselves. Let us inaugurate it 
at once. 


Printed at the Congressional Globe Office. 




























































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